Archive

wiredmikey writes “NVIDIA on Saturday quietly released a driver update (version 310.90) that fixes a recently-uncovered security vulnerability in the NVIDIA Display Driver service (nvvsvc.exe). The vulnerability was disclosed on Christmas day by Peter Winter-Smith, a researcher from the U.K. According to Rapid7′s HD Moore, the vulnerability allows a remote attacker with a valid domain account to gain super-user access to any desktop or laptop running the vulnerable service, and allows an attacker (or rogue user) with a low-privileged account to gain super-access to their own system. In addition to the security fix, driver version 310.90 addresses other bugs and brings performance increases for several games and applications for a number of GPUs including the GeForce 400/500/600 Series.”

First time accepted submitter Tastecicles writes “Patrick Moore the monocled surveyor of the sky who awakened in millions of people an interest in galactic goings on has died at 89. His love of astronomy began at the age of six and that childhood curiosity developed into a lifelong passion. It was a passion he shared through his program, The Sky at Night, which he presented for more than 50 years, only ever missing one episode due to illness. Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore was born at Pinner, Middlesex on 4 Mar 1923. Heart problems meant he spent much of his childhood being educated at home and he became an avid reader. His mother gave him a copy of GF Chambers’ book, The Story of the Solar System, and this sparked his lifelong passion for astronomy. He was soon publishing papers about the moon’s surface, based on observations made with his first three-inch telescope. His 1908 vintage typewriter enabled him to publish more than a thousand books on subjects ranging from astronomy, his first love, to cricket, golf, and music.”

New submitter Nemo the Magnificent writes “Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore’s Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn’t happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a ‘large project at Microsoft’ have written ‘several million lines of code’ testing out the resulting ‘safe parallelism.’” The paper is a good read if you’re into compilers and functional programming. The key to operation is adding permissions to reference types allowing you to declare normal references, read-only references to mutable objects, references to globally immutable objects, and references to isolated clusters of objects. With that information, the compiler is able to prove that chunks of code can safely be run in parallel. Unlike many other approaches, it doesn’t require that your program be purely functional either.

holy_calamity writes “PCs will inevitably shift over to ARM-based chips because efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance, the CEO of chip designer ARM tells MIT Technology Review. He also says the increasing adoption of ARM-based suppliers is good for innovation (and for prices) because it spurs a competitive environment. ‘There’s been a lot more innovation in the world of mobile phones over the last 15-20 years than there has been in the world of PCs.’”

Techdirt has a story about statements from Congressional staffer Stephanie Moore, who had some interesting — and somewhat insulting — things to say about the ‘net-wide protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). “Netizens poisoned the well, and as a result the reliability of the internet is at risk,” she said. Moore went on, “Congress was criticized for not being tech savvy, but from a lot of the comments we got it became clear that the people who were calling us did not understand the bill any better than we did.” The article also points out comments from Steve Metalitz, a lawyer who represents members of the entertainment industry: “Most countries in the world already have this option at their disposal to deal with this problem. If site blocking broke the internet, then the internet would already be broken.”

Your personality type plays a role in how you interact with social networks, and can factor into how much time you spend on sites like Facebook and Twitter, what kind of information you post and how much you regret posting material that others may consider questionable. While research in the area is preliminary, future studies could be crucial for companies looking to target users who are most likely to comment on a brand page or recommend products to friends through social networks.

The findings of the most recent study in the field were recently published in the academic journal Computers in Human Behavior. While limited in scope – the study included 143 college students who completed both phases – researchers Kelly Moore and James C. McElroy said theirs was the first to make use of actual usage data.

The personality study disputed some findings of earlier studies, where researchers had relied on self-reported data from Facebook users. That allowed Moore and McElroy to analyze the actual content that users were posting and see which types of personalities did what when they went online.

Previous research had suggested that the Five Factor Model used to assess personality was the best predictor of Internet activity. The model covers five personality factors, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to new experiences. Moore and McElroy also factored in gender considerations (women tend to spend more time on social networks, post more photos and have more Facebook friends, while men tend to check them more often).

What they found is that personality played a much bigger factor in how people use social networks than previously thought. While personality only accounted for a 6% difference in self-reported time spent on Facebook, it accounted for a 14% variance in regret over Facebook posts and interactions, a 16% variance in postings about one’s self and a 41% variance in postings about others.

Emotional Stability, Personality and Facebook Use

The study confirmed previous research that showed people with less social stability reported spending more time on Facebook, while more emotionally stable and more introverted users primarily used Facebook to keep up with friends. The study also lent some credibility to the theory that introverts often use Facebook to make up for a lack of interpersonal communication.

Previous, self-reported studies had suggested that extroverts spent more time on Facebook and tended to post more personal posts – think of the dreaded “this is what I had for breakfast” status update. But Moore and McElroy turned that notion on its head. In fact, people who scored high in the agreeableness of the personality test tended to be the ones most likely to offer status updates about themselves.

Based on previous studies, the researchers also predicted that conscientious people would likely spend less time and have fewer friends on Facebook. The reasoning was that people with those personality characteristics believe Facebook will not drive efficiency or production.

The study, however, upended that notion, showing that scoring highly for conscientiousness in personality tests was not a reliable predictor of Facebook activity.

What It Means

Moore and McElroy warned that further research is needed and said future studies should work on developing a theoretical framework explaining why some people spend more time and energy on Facebook and social networks than others.

Advertisers are getting wise to the idea that, unlike traditional mediums, social media requires them to find influencers who can effectively make word-of-mouth recommendations for their products and brand. Future research in personality type may not only make it easier to find the people most likely to do this, but firms could develop ways to identify those people based on their social network posts.

StikyPad writes “Comcast is reportedly removing its oft-maligned 250GB data cap, but don’t get too excited. In what appears to be an effort to capitalize on Nielsen’s Law, the Internet’s version of Moore’s Law, Comcast is introducing tiered data pricing. The plan is to include 300GB with the existing price of service, and charge $10 for every 50GB over that limit. As with current policy, Xfinity On Demand traffic will not count against data usage, which Comcast asserts is because the traffic is internal, not from the larger Internet. There has, however, been no indication that the same exemption would apply to any other internal traffic. AT&T and Time Warner have tried unsuccessfully to implement tiered pricing in the past, meeting with strong push back from customers and lawmakers alike. With people now accustomed to, if not comfortable with, tiered data plans on their smartphones, will the public be more receptive to tiered pricing on their wired Internet connections as well, or will they once again balk at a perceived bilking?”

The recurring theme at the TedMed conference earlier this month was the application of Moore’s Law to health care. As Robin Carey noted after the conference on Social Media Today, the idea that Moore’s Law could be driving health care innovation “has given American medicine a sense of inevitable optimism.”

Moore’s Law, which is more a rule of thumb than a law, originally applied to computer hardware and the notion that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law has been used to describe the speed of advance in a wide range of technologies.

But there is a reason that people in health care should only be cautiously optimistic when applying it to their industry.

“The problem is that with the plethora of mHealth apps… very few people are using them. Which begs the question: Why isn’t the technology adapting to people’s needs rather than the other way around?” – David Haddad, program director for Open mHealth

“I wish the enthusiasm was correct, but I fear it is not,” said Dr. J. Deane Waldman, Professor of Pediatrics, Pathology & Decision Science at the University of New Mexico. Deane said the industry has three disincentives to innovation that will partly suppress the effect of Moore’s law, including:

Health care doesn’t have the same financial reward system. Facebook isn’t about to pay $1 billion for the latest hot-ticket item in imaging and informatics.

And, finally, Deane said, “Security always trumps information sharing, and so better, faster linkages are constrained because of security concerns, most of which are bogus.”

One of the other big problems is that, unlike other industries, new technologies in health care are not driven by consumer demand. It’s up to doctors and hospitals to decide whether to implement the latest and greatest piece of health care tech.

“Consumers can be expected to embrace digital health tools more quickly, and this will drive a demand for improvement that should increase the pace of institutional change,” said Robert B. McCray, president and CEO of the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance. “There is great economic resistance to change, however, and more trade protections in health care, so institutional and professional resistance, rather than technology, are the limiting factors in the creation of ‘better health care’.”

The other side of the health care equation is, however, directed squarely at consumers. A wide range of apps aimed at boosting preventive health care measures, including calorie counters, pedometers and monitoring tools for diabetics, are readily available for download onto mobile devices. But David Haddad, the program director for Open mHealth, an open source software architecture project, says they are not necessarily addressing consumer demand.

“If Moore’s Law applies to machines (as is also the case with mobile devices), it’s crashing up against our poor wetware between our ears, which isn’t improving at Moore’s Law, but rather suffers exponential performance degradation with data overload from those Moore’s Law-powered machines,” Haddad said in an email. “The problem is that with the plethora of mHealth apps (on the App Store, Google Play, and in the developing world), very few people are using them. Which begs the question: Why isn’t the technology adapting to people’s needs rather than the other way around?”

The recurring theme at the TedMed conference earlier this month was the application of Moore’s Law to health care. As Robin Carey noted after the conference on Social Media Today, the idea that Moore’s Law could be driving health care innovation “has given American medicine a sense of inevitable optimism.”

Moore’s Law, which is more a rule of thumb than a law, originally applied to computer hardware and the notion that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law has been used to describe the speed of advance in a wide range of technologies.

But there is a reason that people in health care should only be cautiously optimistic when applying it to their industry.

“The problem is that with the plethora of mHealth apps… very few people are using them. Which begs the question: Why isn’t the technology adapting to people’s needs rather than the other way around?” – David Haddad, program director for Open mHealth

“I wish the enthusiasm was correct, but I fear it is not,” said Dr. J. Deane Waldman, Professor of Pediatrics, Pathology & Decision Science at the University of New Mexico. Deane said the industry has three disincentives to innovation that will partly suppress the effect of Moore’s law, including:

Health care doesn’t have the same financial reward system. Facebook isn’t about to pay $1 billion for the latest hot-ticket item in imaging and informatics.

And, finally, Deane said, “Security always trumps information sharing, and so better, faster linkages are constrained because of security concerns, most of which are bogus.”

One of the other big problems is that, unlike other industries, new technologies in health care are not driven by consumer demand. It’s up to doctors and hospitals to decide whether to implement the latest and greatest piece of health care tech.

“Consumers can be expected to embrace digital health tools more quickly, and this will drive a demand for improvement that should increase the pace of institutional change,” said Robert B. McCray, president and CEO of the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance. “There is great economic resistance to change, however, and more trade protections in health care, so institutional and professional resistance, rather than technology, are the limiting factors in the creation of ‘better health care’.”

The other side of the health care equation is, however, directed squarely at consumers. A wide range of apps aimed at boosting preventive health care measures, including calorie counters, pedometers and monitoring tools for diabetics, are readily available for download onto mobile devices. But David Haddad, the program director for Open mHealth, an open source software architecture project, says they are not necessarily addressing consumer demand.

“If Moore’s Law applies to machines (as is also the case with mobile devices), it’s crashing up against our poor wetware between our ears, which isn’t improving at Moore’s Law, but rather suffers exponential performance degradation with data overload from those Moore’s Law-powered machines,” Haddad said in an email. “The problem is that with the plethora of mHealth apps (on the App Store, Google Play, and in the developing world), very few people are using them. Which begs the question: Why isn’t the technology adapting to people’s needs rather than the other way around?”